California’s High-Stakes Estate and Trust Litigators

California’s High-Stakes Estate and Trust Litigators

Among California’s several high-stakes estate and trust litigation law firms, Hackard Law is among the leaders. When estate and trust beneficiaries have high stakes in litigated disputes, they have a major interest in its outcome. There are no magic bullets in estate litigation – there are processes and knowledge-based strategies that can improve outcomes – but the risks of litigation always exist.

The very nature of litigation is risk – risk that the result sought will fail, risk that the expenditure of time and money will not be worth the reward, and risk that the costs of failure can be high. Such risks should be assessed and are a part of reasoned decision-making.

Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts is full of interesting stories and observations designed to teach her readers how to get comfortable with uncertainty and improve their decision-making. Duke’s observations are worth noting: “In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. We are constantly deciding among alternative futures … Whenever we make a choice, we are betting on a potential future. We are betting that the future version of us that results from the decisions we make will be better off. At stake in a decision is that the return to us (measured in money … or whatever we value in that circumstance) will be greater than what we are giving up by betting against the other alternative future versions of us.”

Estate and trust disputes are rife with alternative futures. In the words of Annie Duke, “[O]ur decisions are always bets. We routinely decide among alternatives, put resources at risk, assess the likelihood of different outcomes, and consider what it is that we value. Every decision commits us to some course of action that, by definition, eliminates acting on other alternatives. Not placing a bet on something is, itself, a bet.”